A drunken tinker is carried to a lord's bed and told he has slept for fifteen years
Christopher Sly of Burton-heath in the Induction, for whom the whole play is staged
Shakespeare · Comedies
The Taming of the Shrew
c. 1590–92
Comedy — an Induction plus an Italianate plot drawn partly from Gascoigne's Supposes, after Ariosto
A drunken tinker is picked up outside an alehouse and persuaded by a lord that he is a nobleman, and the play proper is performed for him. In Padua, Baptista Minola will not let his gentle younger daughter marry until her sharp-tongued elder sister is off his hands, so the fortune-hunting Petruchio undertakes to wed and 'tame' Katherina by withholding food, sleep and clothes. Her long closing speech of wifely obedience is the most argued-over passage in the comedies.
How to spot them
- ▸Padua, and a father who will not marry off his younger daughter first
- ▸An Induction in which a drunken tinker is gulled into thinking himself a lord
- ▸A suitor arrives late to his own wedding in absurd clothes and on a broken-down horse
- ▸Tutors in disguise court a daughter under her father's nose
- ▸A wager on which of three wives will come when her husband calls
Scenes, characters & lines
'Kiss me, Kate; we will be married o' Sunday'
Petruchio at the end of the wooing scene — the line that gave Cole Porter his title
A bridegroom insists the sun is the moon until his wife agrees
On the road back to Padua, Petruchio's final test of obedience
A husband starves his bride in the name of kindness and sends back a tailor's gown
Petruchio's 'taming school': the meat is burnt, the cap is a trifle, the gown a masquing stuff
A servant swaps places with his master to woo an heiress by proxy
Tranio impersonates Lucentio while Lucentio poses as the Latin tutor Cambio
'I am ashamed that women are so simple / To offer war where they should kneel for peace'
Katherina's closing speech on a wife's duty, won in a wager against two other husbands
A pedant from Mantua is press-ganged into playing a Pisan father
The false Vincentio, produced to guarantee the marriage settlement, until the real one arrives
Key ideas
- The Induction frames the taming as a play performed to fool a poor man into believing he is a lord, so the whole story is a joke about people playing roles
- Whether Katherina's final speech is sincere, ironic or a private arrangement with Petruchio is the central directorial choice
Quick-fire facts
- •Not printed before the First Folio of 1623, where it appears among the comedies
- •A related anonymous play, The Taming of a Shrew, was printed in 1594; scholars dispute whether it is a source, a memorial reconstruction or a derivative
- •In the Folio text Christopher Sly is never brought back at the end; the 1594 A Shrew gives him a closing scene, and many productions borrow it
- •Cole Porter's 1948 musical Kiss Me, Kate stages a backstage romance around a production of the play
- •The 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You relocates the plot to a Seattle high school
- •Franco Zeffirelli's 1967 film starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor
- •Katherina's sister Bianca is courted by Lucentio, Hortensio and the old man Gremio
- •Petruchio's servant Grumio and Lucentio's servant Tranio and Biondello drive most of the farce
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Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — The Taming of the Shrew
- Royal Shakespeare Company — The Taming of the Shrew